A comparison of activity‐based to event‐based prospective memory

Four experiments were conducted that directly compared activity‐based to event‐based prospective memory. In general, when a goal is established to perform an activity at the conclusion of a different activity, successful completion suffers as compared with associating the same intention with a concrete environmental event. In this regard, activity‐based performance was worse than comparable event‐based conditions. However, certain conditions such as making transitional points salient between tasks and providing practice may ameliorate these differences between the two kinds of intentions. Other variables that may discriminate between these two kinds of intentions are considered; but the initial evidence favours the notion that ultimate goal completion covaries with the type of intention that is established initially at encoding and the degree of environmental support provided at retrieval. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Women gaze behaviour in assessing female bodies: the effects of clothing,body size,own body composition and body satisfaction

Psychological Research - Often with minimally clothed figures depicting extreme body sizes, previous studies have shown women tend to gaze at evolutionary determinants of attractiveness when...     

Increases in parental investment and child health as a result of an early intervention

Parental investment (involving time or money invested in 3-year-olds) and child health were assessed as an outcome of (a) children’s risk status (preterm vs. full-term birth) and (b) maternal resources (defined here in terms of their problem-solving skills in resolving caregiving challenges). Resources were varied systematically as a function of maternal participation in a traditional home visitation program versus a novel cognitively enhanced program that facilitated parenting skills more successfully. As predicted, mothers in the traditional home visitation condition invested preferentially in low-risk children, whereas mothers in the cognitively enhanced condition invested preferentially in high-risk children (who, in turn, showed maximal health benefits). Maternal investment of time in care provision mediated the relationship between predictor variables and children’s health. This pattern supports an evolutionary model of parental investment in which parents show discriminative solicitude based on the reproductive potential of the child and parents’ access to relevant resources.     

Religious commitment and positive mood as information about meaning in life

Two studies examined the role of religious commitment in moderating the relationship between positive affect (PA) and meaning in life. In Study 1, Sample 1, religiosity was found to moderate the relationship between naturally occurring PA and meaning in life, showing that high levels of religiosity attenuated the effects of PA on meaning in life. In Study 1, Sample 2, religiosity similarly moderated the effects of induced mood on meaning in life. In addition, this pattern of results was shown to be unique to meaning in life compared to another life domain (life satisfaction). In Study 2, subliminally priming Christians with positive religious words (e.g., “Heaven”) was further shown to weaken the association between PA and meaning in life, whereas subliminal primes of negative religious words (e.g., “hell”) weakened the association between religious commitment and meaning in life. A competition of cues model is proposed to account for these effects.     

The impact of waiting-list times on client attendance for relationship counselling

The impact of waiting-list times on subsequent attendance for appointments has received extensive attention within the area of health, but hitherto has received relatively little interest from counselling services. Given the current pressure on all welfare agencies for accountability and efficient use of resources, counselling organisations need to consider resource usage and barriers to efficiency. A study was therefore made of one aspect of this issue: the impact of short v. long time-delays between initial referral and first appointment for relationship counselling. It was found that clients offered appointments within two weeks of referral were significandy more likely to attend for first appointment than were clients whose appointment came between 4 and 12 weeks post-referral. The implications of these results for organisational policy are discussed.     

Processing strategies and secondary memory in very rapid forgetting

When a memory test is unexpected, recall performance is quite poor at retention intervals as short as 2–4 seconds. Orienting tasks that change encoding conditions are known to affect forgetting in such “very rapid forgetting” paradigms where people are misled to believe that recall will not be required. We evaluated the hypothesis that differences in forgetting among orienting tasks are attributable to contributions of secondary memory during encoding in two experiments. In Experiment 1, short-term recall performance was inversely related to task demands during encoding, although long-term memory performance was not. Task demands were assessed by making the duration of stimulus presentation dependent on the time required to perform three different orienting tasks. In Experiment 2, we compared performance of that variable-length stimulus presentation to the fixed-length presentation used in most prior research. The results suggested that additional encoding or rehearsal time does not have an appreciable impact on short-term performance. Thus, differences in forgetting appeared to be a function of the contribution of secondary memory rather than a function of the time available to engage in primary memory rehearsal strategies.     

Conceptual priming in a generative problem-solving task

Three experiments explored how participants solved a very open-ended generative problem-solving task. Previous research has shown that when participants are shown examples, novel creations will tend to conform to features shared across those examples (Smith, Ward, & Schumacher, 1993). We made the shared features of the examples conceptually related to one another. We found that when the features were related to the concept of hostility, participants' creations contained hostile features that were not part of any of the examples. These results suggest that participants will design novel entities to be consistent with emergent properties of examples shown to them. We also found that a mild hostility prime from unscrambling sentences had a similar conceptual effect. Together, the two effects suggest that conceptual priming of generative cognitive tasks will influence the cognitive aspects of the creative process.     

Judgments of temporal duration while processing verbal and physiognomic stimuli

Left- and right-handed male college students made verbal estimations of temporal durations during performance of recognition memory for words and faces, and with no concurrent task. Time judgments were shorter with both concurrent memory tasks than in the control condition, but did not differ between the two memory tasks. Also, these results were additive across groups. Considering the differential involvement of the two cerebral hemispheres in processing verbal and physiognomic stimuli, and the lack of an interaction between group (left- vs right- handers) and memory task, it was concluded that the results do not support a lateralization of function hypothesis with respect to judgments of temporal duration.